FEATURE
FARMER FOCUS
ED WHITE
We are the Slow Farming Company, a fifth generation farming family outside Castle Cary in South Somerset. The farm is run by my stepfather Rob and mother Sally, and I work here part time along with my wife Camilla – our three young children like to get involved too! We are on a regenerative journey with the aim of creating nutrient rich food from diverse cropping, with the added benefit of carbon capture. The farm is on medium to heavy clay, and runs to approximately 160 acres.
We have a herd of 180 head of beef cattle, running an Aberdeen Angus bull on mainly Hereford cross British Friesian cows with a few Limosian and Belgian blue crosses for good measure. Our oldest cow is 16 years old and still producing a calf a year. We deliberately moved over to a spring calving regime in 2017 to take advantage of the spring grass and milder weather.
If he could do it in America, why couldn’t we do it here? A couple of years before, Rob had ploughed up two small fields and planted a herbal ley mix undersown with spring barley. When we cut off the barley for wholecrop, the herbal ley carried on with gusto. Following on from those initial trial plots, we Min Tilled 30 acres of former arable land and seeded in the crop with a Wox GreenMaster. Later that year we were mob grazing through the herbal ley with Chicory at up to ten foot tall. Driving the buggy through it to set the fences was a particular skill. The cattle did very well on it and showed good growth rates. In 2016 we stopped adding any cereal to the diet, although we had only been feeding the equivalent of a pound a head. We wanted to move to a pure grass fed diet, not least for the emerging nutritional benefits of 100% pasture fed beef, but we also just felt it was the right thing to do. Alongside the beef, in July 2017 we converted a mobile home into a pastured egg-mobile with 300 laying hens. These eggs were initially sold through a local pack house, under the brand Birds and Herds. The hens followed the cows scratching through and spreading the dung, as well as producing their own source of nitrogen. Unfortunately, this partnership came to an end when the packer went into administration. We had a hectic six weeks of building a packing room, getting an egg packing licence and finding customers for all the eggs. However now, most weeks, we have more customers than we have eggs.
Our move into regenerative farming has been gradual, over the last seven years or so. We reduced and then dropped artificial fertilizer on our pasture ground five years ago, and ceased the pure arable rotation four years ago. We were driven to do this by the lack of life in our soil and the loss in wildlife in our fields. We were spurred on by Tim, a neighbouring farmer, who introduced us to the likes of Gabe Brown and Joel Salatin. Between Rob and me many hours of YouTube talks were consumed. Regenerative farming was probably the most talked about subject around our kitchen tables between 2013 and 2016 – also the period in which our two of our three children were born and we obtained planning permission to convert a traditional barn into a home for our family. We were lucky enough to hear a talk by Joel at Bristol University in 2016 and for us both it was a bit of an epiphany moment.
60 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
ISSUE 13 | APRIL 2021
